‘Come on, Dad,’ she says. ‘We’ll be landing soon. Come and sit next to me.’ My dad stops wrestling with the door and June scowls softly by my side. They seem to know they couldn’t stop me going with Luce, even if they tried. Hand in hand, Lucy steers me back to my seat. That’s the last I remember from the dream. There are different characters, dead people from my life. Sometimes it’s my nan, my Auntie Christina and, once that I recall, our little Scotty dog Boots tried to bark me off that plane, but Lucy always arrives and pulls me back in the nick of time.
It’s Carol’s high-pitched laugh that brings me back from remembering the plane, landing me again on the ward. Carol’s usually in her office, but there’s a shortage of health assistants today so it sounds like Mary’s roped Carol into helping her change George’s bed sheets. My eyes are only open a fraction. Mary moved my head so all I can see now is the end of my bed, and a small bit of the ward floor. My chin is almost pressed to my chest, but my ears are perfectly tuned.
‘Just like old times, eh, Caz?’ Mary says and I hear George’s curtain dance along its rail as she pulls it around George’s bed. ‘Us two rolling up our sleeves.’
Unlike other nurses, they don’t count down before they lift George, and they don’t remind each other to tuck in the sheet corners. These two have been around for long enough, they know all the steps to this dance.
‘So did you speak to the police then, Caz?’
I get it. Mary is, of course, after a gossip.
‘They called this morning to say they’ve arrested that guy who found her, the neighbour.’ Carol’s voice is lower than usual, a voice for saying things she knows she probably shouldn’t. ‘They’ve charged him with drink-driving and attempted manslaughter. Paula says she’s surprised it took them so long; she says she could tell it was him when he tried to barge his way in to see Cassie last week.’
I feel movement behind the curtain, the tug as they pull away old sheets. The women pause.
‘Well, you know what I think?’ Mary doesn’t wait for a response. Carol will hear what Mary thinks whether she wants to or not. ‘They were having an affair, weren’t they? This neighbour and Cassie. It’s obvious. She told him about the baby, their baby, and he panicked like a bloody idiot.’
‘Oh god, do you really think so, Mary?’
‘I really do. It’s just a pity we can’t do a paternity test now, get it over and done with for the sake of Jack and his poor mum, but with Cassie in her condition it’s out of the question.’
There’s a familiar swoosh as one of them floats a new sheet across the bed.
‘It’s heartbreaking. That poor man, he adores her. You know what Lizzie said the other day? She saw him reading one of those baby development books aloud to her? He’d be a lovely dad.’
‘I know, I keep thinking about his mum as well. They won’t find out for months if it’s Jack’s or not, not until the baby’s born. But you know, I’d rather know the truth, wouldn’t you? I mean imagine raising a kiddie, thinking it’s yours and then finding out years later it’s someone else’s. That’s got to be worse?’
Carol doesn’t say anything for a moment, practised hands slap over the starched, taut sheet.
‘I just hope this neighbour does the decent thing and tells the truth before the baby comes along. Little mite shouldn’t be born into all of this, should it?’
Moments later, carrying plastic bags with George’s old sheets bundled inside, I see the two nurses’ little white trainers pad across my narrow view. They stop whispering as soon as they’re on the ward and I try and feel glad like them, relieved that justice is a little more in reach for Cassie and her little one, but I keep thinking of his face, his eyes wide, fiery with terror, desperate for a new image of Cassie to wipe the one in the stream, crumpled and bleeding, from his mind. I think about how he froze, tense as a deer who knows he’s being hunted.
The afternoon rolls quietly into early evening. Jack visits Cassie. He plays her music. I can’t hear what he’s saying to her, if anything, over the music. The notes sing through my bones; I drink up every one like drops of nectar. At some point, my eyes shut and I drift away, to a place where a light breeze glances my skin, and Lucy is by my side.
My eyes don’t open again until after dark. My head is resting slightly to the left, so I can just see the bottom right corner of Cassie’s bed and a section of floor, made shiny by the light next to Cassie’s bed. It must be late; Paula often opens the curtains between Cassie and me around midnight as it’s easier for her to keep an eye on us that way. I’m counting along with my breath, in, out, in, out trying to trick my mind to sleep, to slip away to my dream again, to the outside sun and Lucy’s little hand in my own, when I hear the ward door swoosh open. Thinking it’s a nurse I go back to my breath. But then I realise something’s missing. Whoever just came in isn’t bustling around like the nurses always do. In fact, they’re moving so quietly I can only just make out the lightest tap and squeal as they walk down the hard rubber floor. They pause at the end of the ward, before they start moving again and a shadow comes to hover in my view, a head, stretched long and weird by the light behind it.
Maybe it’s a doc from another ward.
The figure moves to the foot of Cassie’s bed. I can only see him from the hips down. He’s wearing jeans; they bag around his legs like extra skin. He keeps his weight to his left, slightly wonky, nurturing his right. He moves gingerly towards her and out of my view.
I’ve never seen a doc in jeans, not here.
All I can see now is his shadow flickering in and out of my view, like a trapped flame. He’s moving, he’s doing something to Cassie and I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything but I imagine him pulling the tube out of her head, Cassie’s blood spraying the ceiling bright poppy-crimson, my screams echoing, useless around my body. I long to turn away, to disappear in a puff of smoke, but this is it, this is what I must endure for being so fucking pointless, forced to watch but not quite see, whatever cruel thing he’s doing to her, to them, prone and vulnerable on the sacrificial slab.
A phlegmy splutter from either Ellen or George and suddenly the shadow stops flickering. From behind her curtain Ellen shrieks, ‘No!’, like an angry gull. ‘Not that!’
Ellen!
My heart seems to find itself again, slotting back into a rhythm as the shadow takes on form and the jeans flash back in my view.
Again, shout again, Ellen!
An alarm, from George, starts tunelessly screeching in a minor key. I will one of my machines to join the panic, to help get him far, far away from her. He moves too quickly; there’s a tuneless clatter as he clumsily kicks a stainless steel trolley. My heart monitor starts beeping. We sound like an angry flock of birds, screeching at the intruder. It’s too noisy and my heart is still flapping like a dying fish in my chest, so I can’t hear him leave, but I imagine him, trying to move quickly, dragging his leg as though he’s been shot, away from the ward.